Social Poetics by Mark Nowak

Author:Mark Nowak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2020-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Photograph © Lisa Arrastia

FIGURE 10: Christine Lewis playing steel drums at a PEN World Voices Festival event. New York. May 9, 2015.

According to Rancière, the very suggestion that workers imagine and create and dream—and write poetry—is an inherently militant act. Throughout his study of proletarian poets during the French Revolution, Rancière unearths in the archives a completely novel motivation for workers to write: “It became apparent that workers had never needed the secrets of domination explained to them, as their problem was quite a different one. It was to withdraw themselves, intellectually and materially, from the forms by which this domination imprinted on their bodies, and imposed on their actions, modes of perception, attitudes, and a language.” Rancière discovers an aspect beyond revolutionary struggle in workers’ desires to write poetry: “For the workers of the 1830s, the question was not to demand the impossible, but to realize it themselves … in the very exercise of everyday work, or by winning from nightly rest the time to discuss, write, compose verses, or develop philosophies.”50

When I was still living in Minneapolis, a group of my community college students from Somalia heard about the poetry workshops I had been facilitating at the nearby St. Paul Ford Assembly Plant, and they asked if I might be willing to run a series of poetry workshops for a small Somali workers’ support organization they wanted to organize.51 They named their organization Rufaidah, after the first documented nurse in the Muslim world, Rufaidah bint Sa’ad (or Rufaida Al-Aslamia). Nimo Abdi, one of these community college students (who a decade later would invite me to see her receive her doctorate in nursing practice), penned a poem in our workshop about how she couldn’t escape the workday and didn’t have the right to dream, even as she slept:

After working 12 hour “longs” during the night

I go home in the morning and dream about work …

Not only do I take all the germs home …

I also take all the worrisome patients.

I dream and dream

every morning about work …

Have I charted on all my patients …?

Have I recorded the input and output …?

Have I documented the PRN medication that I gave at 20:00?

Here I found myself awakened from my dream

and calling the day nurse to tell her

what I forgot to mention during report….

I found myself dreaming about work

day after day … 7 days in a row

It feels like déjà vu …

Only with different patients

that I dream about

and what I missed to chart at work.

Nimo’s poem, in one sense, articulates what Rancière calls “the insurrection of love,”52 an insurrection held in common by nurses, domestic workers, teachers, therapists, and other workers in the contemporary caregiving industries. Employers and managers in these female-dominated industries regularly devalue their employees’ need for self-care. Nimo addresses this devaluation in many of her stanzas. In order to organize and fight against this constant devaluation of women’s labor, the creation of new worker centers like Rufaidah and DWU has significantly increased in recent years, especially in immigrant and refugee communities.

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